Colfax students dissect owl pellets

Left: Raina Parson opens up an owl pellet with a mixture of disgust and fascination. On the right, Monty Erickson pokes around to look for rodent bones.Right: Parks program director Janel Goebel teaches the class how to remove their dirty gloves.

“I found a tooth! Look at that,” said third grader Cal Lewis, holding up a single, yellow rodent tooth.

Fur, skulls and tiny yellow teeth are scattered on the desks of Glenda Grimm’s third grade classroom.

Monday, all 16 of Grimm’s students dissected owl pellets under the guidance of Janel Goebel, county parks program director.

The annual program put on by the parks department teaches Colfax and Endicott students about the county parks system.

This year, Colfax students dissected owl pellets.

Endicott students learned about animal tracks and both classes hiked the county’s Kamiak Butte trail.

Students wore blue gloves and dug into the furry, mouse-sized pellets with toothpicks.

There were some genuine groans of disgust as the pellets were passed out (they smell strongly of rubbing alcohol), but students warmed up soon enough when they received the toothpicks to dig around.

The pellets were collected along the Snake River at Wawawaii Park, which is also operated by the county.

“There’s some pretty good-sized owls down there,” Goebel told the students.

Goebel explained to the students that scientists can determine many things from looking at an owl pellet, including what types of food the owl was eating, how available food was and the size of the owl.

Putting students in direct contact with nature and the parks system is intended to cultivate within them a growing respect for parks, Goebel said.

This is the main point behind the parks program visiting local schools, she said.

“A lot of this has to do with educating kids and making them feel the parks belong to them,” she said.

As students picked out delicate gray ribs, yellow teeth, skulls and beaks, they matched them to a skeleton chart. The chart helps students identify birds, mice, and voles by matching bones.

Some pellets contain more than one skull.

Goebel explained an owl pellet is coughed up as waste by an owl because its stomach can’t digest fur and bones.

So after eating, an owl will vomit up a mass of the fibrous waste from its meal in the form of a pellet.

“This owl craved rodents.

I can tell,” Lewis said to his teammates after pulling out several rodent skulls.

Park ranger Dave Mahan collected the pellets at Wawawaii Park, which he manages for the county.

A host of big barn owls make their homes in the trees at the park.

Picking up the hairy pellets was easy, he said.

“They’re fairly obvious.

You can see them under certain trees where the owls roost.

There’s piles of them.

I just went around with a zip lock bag and picked them up,” he said.